I’m constantly asked to explain what I do for a living. Here is an attempt to do so in laypersons’ terms. I’ll assume my readers are non-scientists and non-engineers, but that they’ve taken a high school biology class. “Bioinformatics” is the application of mathematics and computer science to biological data, particularly molecular biology data. By […]

Church to bar ratio by county from U.S. Census Bureau data: The brighter the color, the higher the church to bar ratio. Counties missing data necessary for the computation are shown in black. Method From the 2013 County Business Patterns data published at http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/download/, I extracted the number of establishments in each county that have […]

I’ve been mathematically analyzing my Twitter feed to determine how best to position my tweets for maximum impact, and have been documenting the work on this blog. While I’ve not come to any brilliant conclusions yet, I’ve made progress. My first post on the subject described clustering my followers by their hashtag use to see […]

To prepare for a book I intend to write on the science of gender identity, I drafted the following three blog posts to collect my thoughts. They are highly technical; I need to recast the content for the layperson. I also assembled some of my own biological data to analyze. The first blog post, http://badassdatascience.com/2015/06/06/sci-gender-identity-01/, […]

I live in an RV; my goal is comfort and easy mobility. I like to have guests, and my guests typically like wine. Therefore I made the following modifications to store and display wine bottles and wine glasses in a way that survives travel and is easily accessible. First I installed a wine glass holder. […]

I live in an RV, and my goal is to move “off the grid” without a steep decline in my standard of living. This requires reduced energy consumption to be sustainable. Here I describe my effort to reduce propane usage through installation of extra insulation. I’ve started covering the walls and ceiling with reflective insulation, […]

I live in an RV, and my goal is to move “off the grid” without a steep decline in my standard of living. This requires reduced power consumption. Lighting sounds like a good place to start: I measured the DC current consumed by two incandescent cabin bulbs (2.7 Amps) and then that consumed by two […]

I’ve been working with the Twitter API to develop my own Twitter analytics tool chain, and have been documenting the results on this blog. My last post on the subject described clustering my followers by their hashtag use to see whose tweets are most like mine. My goal of this project is to figure out best […]

I live in an RV. However most RVs, including mine, are not designed for full time residence. Therefore I have to modify it to make it more livable. This turns out to be quite an engineering task, rather than a technician one, because in most cases I need to design de novo solutions. In a […]

I’ve started working with the Twitter API to develop my own Twitter analytics tool chain. My goals are to figure out who the influencers in my subjects are, figure out how best to position my tweets, etc. I could certainly pay for this service, but then I wouldn’t learn any new technical skills in the […]